The Alarmists

by Don Hoesel

  The problem was how to approach a company as large as Sheffield Petroleum with any hope of earning a helpful response. He gave that some thought yet nothing jumped out at him. He decided such weighty cogitation required the proper fuel, so he stood, stretched, and went to the refrigerator for a beer. It was as he was downing the first sip that the thought came to him.

  “Andrea, what’s the name of our congressman?”

  “Cooper,” she called from the living room.

  “Cooper,” he said to himself. “Okay then. We’ll just see what those crooks at Sheffield Petroleum have to say when a congressman gets involved.”

  His wife appeared over his shoulder as he found the representative’s website, located the constituency feedback form, and began to type a message. Andrea watched him for a while, and about a minute in, Albert felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “I didn’t realize how computer savvy you are,” she said. When he glanced at her, he saw the same look on her face he’d seen the other day when he’d forgotten all about poor Ben Robinski.

  “Not now, woman,” he said. “I’ve built up a proper righteous indignation and I don’t want to waste it.”

  He turned back to typing and felt Andrea’s other hand come down on his other shoulder.

  “Political activism too,” she said. “I barely know who you are anymore, love.”

  He couldn’t help but chuckle, especially as her fingers touched that ticklish spot on the back of his neck. He shook her off, though he didn’t put much into it.

  “Hold your horses,” he said. “Or would you rather I not find a way to get those checks you’ve been on me about?”

  That got her attention, but it only stopped her advances for a short time. Fortunately it was just long enough for Albert.

  —

  The thing that struck Brent the most as he sat in Colonel Richards’s office was that this second experience was a good deal different than his first, when the colonel had, in his own subdued fashion, wowed the visiting professor. After all, during what other job interview could the man doing the interviewing ignore a fire in order to fully vet a qualified candidate?

  The thing that made this visit a bit unusual was the colonel’s body language. As Brent watched him, the way he sat, the way he put his hands on the desk and then immediately withdrew them, he seemed committed to discussing something that he didn’t want to discuss. Brent, who had taken a psychology class or two on his way to earning his degree, theorized that the colonel was caught between a sense of duty and one of profound discomfort, yet he felt convicted enough about the topic to press on anyway.

  The colonel shifted in his seat again, leaning forward and placing both hands around a cup of tea with the tea bag still in evidence.

  “Dr. Michaels, we’ve been so busy since you returned from Afghanistan that I haven’t thanked you for what you did for Captain Madigan,” Richards said.

  The statement caught Brent off guard. Judging from the colonel’s discomfort, something like a simple thanks seemed to lack the punch necessary for the moment.

  “I’m not sure thanks are warranted,” Brent said. “Without Maddy slamming my head into a table, I probably wouldn’t be here.”

  That drew a hint of a smile from Richards, with Brent coming to realize that a minimal curl of the lip from this man was the equivalent of a full-blown laugh from most others. Despite that, Richards shook his head.

  “According to the report—and Amy—you took out at least two of them. And a firefight on foreign soil is far beyond the terms of your consult.”

  “Self-preservation will make a guy do crazy things,” Brent answered with a grin, one that failed to penetrate the colonel’s demeanor, as evidenced by the now-vanished smile.

  “Dr. Michaels, I may be overstepping my bounds, but you have to realize that each and every one of these people is, for lack of a better word, family. What happens to one happens to all of us.”

  The colonel stopped and surveyed Brent, as if to see if the professor was tracking with him. A nod from Brent signified he was.

  “It hasn’t escaped my attention that you and Captain Madigan have become close during your time with us,” Richards said, and in a flash Brent understood the real reason for the meeting, as well as for the colonel’s discomfort. In fact, now that he knew what this was about, he felt a bit uncomfortable himself.

  “I suppose that can happen when you spend a significant amount of time with someone,” Brent said.

  But the expression on Richards’s face said he was not satisfied with the response.

  “Amy has been my liaison for a good many outside consultants,” Richards said. “And I can assure you that this one is a bit different.”

  The colonel let that hang there as he watched Brent, with the professor growing increasingly more uncomfortable under the scrutiny. For some odd reason he felt the need to apologize. And since he didn’t like that feeling, he chose to get some kind of foothold in the conversation.

  “Colonel, if you have something to say, then just come out and say it.”

  “Without trying to sound like Amy’s father, I’m curious as to your intentions.”

  “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  The colonel held his stony gaze for another few seconds before allowing it to dissolve into a sigh. “You have to understand—Maddy has been a member of my team for many years, and consequently I’ve assumed what I can only describe as a parental concern, however inappropriate that might be.”

  Brent only nodded.

  “What complicates things is that Maddy and I attend the same church.” The colonel paused and fixed Brent with a hard look. “I’m sure that by now you’re aware of the importance the captain places on her faith?”

  Again a nod from Brent, although with wider eyes.

  “My guess, Dr. Michaels, is that you’re one of the few men Maddy has met who can keep up with her intellectually. Did you know that she received an invitation to fill a senior researcher position with NASA? That alone should tell you how bright she is.”

  Then the colonel allowed silence to fill the room, perhaps weighing what he would say next. After a while he continued, “Usually the consultants we hire come here, do what we ask, and then take their paycheck and leave. Most of them we never see again. And the defining characteristic of most of these people is a lack of personality, which seems common among those with doctoral degrees.”

  Brent had to chuckle at that.

  “But for some reason Maddy has attached herself to you, and my concern is that you don’t understand the significance of that.”

  Brent understood the backhanded compliment implied by the colonel’s words.

  “With all due respect, Colonel, I’m well aware of the captain’s religious beliefs. And I’ve been nothing but honest with her about my own.”

  The colonel didn’t ask him to expound on the nature of those beliefs, but Brent suspected he already knew. Instead, Richards broached another topic almost as sacrosanct as religion.

  “Why aren’t you married, Dr. Michaels?” Richards asked.

  The question caught Brent more off guard than he would have thought possible. He knew that he didn’t have to answer it—that it had nothing to do with the consult—and yet he felt as if he were somehow a knight of old defending a lady’s honor.

  “I guess I’ve just never met the right woman,” he said.

  “Which is likely the same reason Maddy would give if I posed the same question to her.”

  “Well, Maddy and I are both adults. Even in the military, I’m pretty sure she has the option of dating whomever she wants.”

  It took Brent several seconds, and the colonel’s half smile, before he realized that he may have said something incriminating. And in reviewing his statement he suspected he’d found it.

  “We’re not dating, Colonel,” he said. “Not even close.”

  In the colonel’s eyes, Brent recognized triumph. But he also saw a weariness of sorts, as if constantly spreading hi
s personal resources to cover both external and internal threats had exacted a toll on the man. The revelation made Brent reconsider anything he’d said that could have combated Richards’s observations.

  “I assure you that I have no ungentlemanlike intentions as far as Maddy’s concerned,” Brent said. “If my field has taught me anything, it’s that personal beliefs are not easily trifled with. And if my relationship with Maddy continues beyond the consult, I promise I won’t do anything that would put her in conflict with her faith.”

  Even as he said it, Brent understood that he was making a promise he might not be able to keep. Few things were more important to someone in his field than the truth. And were he to come to believe that Amy Madigan’s faith lacked that essential element required of a belief system, he knew he would call her on it.

  He suspected the colonel knew it too, which explained why, when the professor left the man’s office, he felt the eyes on his back.

  December 15, 2012, 12:10 P.M.

  Brent’s primary thought as he sat at the table that had become as familiar to him as his desk back at the university was an understanding that despite the vast resources of the federal government, and the new cooperative atmosphere touted among the various branches of the military and civilian organizations, pinpointing the source of a global threat was akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

  From all the reports to which he’d been privy, there was nothing that anyone could point to that spoke of a global conspiracy tied to the Mayan 2012 phenomenon. Brent put little stock in that, because it would be difficult for anyone reviewing large swaths of data to avoid having their preconceptions compromised by a knowledge of what they were looking for. He was becoming convinced that the only way they would locate his polarizing event was to stumble upon it—to find something within a particular data set that at first they would find themselves unable to qualify—and only later would they realize it pointed to the thing they’d been looking for.

  He was in his assigned office, and of course Maddy was there. It was the first time he’d seen her since his conversation with Richards that morning. If nothing else, he was gratified to learn that the dialogue between them had not found its way to Maddy, who reacted to him in the manner she always had, which was somewhere between a corporate professional and a schoolgirl crush. The troubling thing was that he felt the same way. But Richards had called him on any designs he might have, and that left Brent considering how to proceed.

  The good thing was that Brent understood that the seriousness of their investigation superseded anything between them. Even so, that didn’t make sitting in a room with her any easier.

  Fortunately, Rawlings also occupied a place at the table, which forced Brent to concentrate on the business at hand. And with only six days in which to discover the polarizing event, the professor found that the distraction caused by Rawlings was for the benefit of them all.

  Brent glanced over at Maddy, who with a laptop in front of her was studying a steady stream of news stories, working the keyboard with her good arm. Now that a tentative connection had been established between the incidents the team had investigated and the approaching 2012 phenomenon, Brent hoped that a thorough study of the data would reveal something they might have missed. A too hopeful stance perhaps, but one he had to take with the calendar mocking him.

  He was settling back into his own work, reexamining the graphs he’d started to develop his first day on the job which had grown increasingly complex the more he worked on them, when Colonel Richards entered the room.

  “There’s been a coup in Cuba,” Richards said.

  All eyes went to the man standing in the doorway.

  “The Fifth Battalion marched into Havana this morning,” Richards continued. “In less than an hour they had control of every governmental agency, and if we’re to believe the reports, they did so without firing a shot.”

  It took a minute, but Rawlings voiced the collective thought. “That doesn’t make any sense. Every report we’ve seen over the last few years has told us that the political situation in Cuba was as normalized as it’s ever been.” He shook his head. “Did anyone see this coming?”

  Richards turned to the captain, who replied, “There wasn’t a hint of it until yesterday. And by then it was too late to do anything about it.”

  “So what does this mean?” Brent asked.

  “I have no idea,” Richards said. “The head of the Fifth Battalion is General Lopez, and nothing we’ve seen in his file indicates political ambition. In fact, he was close to retirement. Another few years and he could have turned in his stars and carved out a portion of the island for himself.”

  Perhaps it was because he was nonmilitary, but Brent could see that he was probably the only person there considering the weighty events of the morning with anything beyond a national defense interest.

  “Colonel,” he said. “Isn’t this all a bit too convenient? From everything you’re saying, Cuba has maintained a stable government for decades. And for it all to end now, when we’re investigating instances of instability around the globe?”

  “Which is why I stopped by to let you know, Dr. Michaels.” The colonel fixed him with a look. “You’ll find I’m not a big fan of coincidences.”

  Brent appreciated the validation, but his brain was already moving into clinical mode. “Okay, where is your information coming from?”

  “We’re getting reports out of Guantanamo and the embassy,” Richards said. “So far neither of them has been touched. We’re sending in additional troops to protect the base and to help evacuate the embassy.” The colonel paused to address an internal issue and then added, “I doubt Lopez will go anywhere near Guantanamo. He knows that we won’t do anything as long as he keeps it in the family.”

  “What about Castro and his brother?” Maddy asked.

  “Raúl has already been dragged out into the street and shot,” Richards said. “We have some nice footage of it courtesy of CNN. As far as Fidel, we don’t have anything.”

  Then it hit Brent from out of nowhere. “Colonel, how are the stocks doing?”

  Richards smiled. “We have someone on that right now. On the surface it looks like commodities are up and tech stocks down.”

  Brent absorbed that and said, “That makes sense.”

  “There’s one other thing,” Richards said. “Are you aware that stock prices for companies that manufacture weapons systems have risen dramatically?”

  An innocuous question and yet Brent could see that everyone around the table understood the significance of it.

  “Can you backtrack on some of those stocks and see how long they’ve been rising?” the professor asked.

  “We’re working on that too. With a little cooperation from the SEC, we should have an answer to that by the end of the day.”

  Which left them, in Brent’s estimation, in roughly the same spot they were in before Richards arrived. What excited the researcher in him, though, was that by the end of the day they could have a good deal more data than they’d had when the day started. And with this team he was coming to understand that the data was everything.

  —

  One did not reach a position such as Canfield’s without creating an enemy or two. The decisions required—the bridges burned—in order to clear the path ahead resulted in a list of people harboring varying degrees of animosity toward the aggressive executive. The flip side of that truth was that one seldom navigated that route without also building a network of friends.

  One of those friends was a person in Human Resources who left a voice mail for Canfield telling him about inquiries into his personnel file. According to Nadine, these inquiries came from the highest of levels, which meant Van Camp’s own administrative assistant. And while Nadine could not pinpoint anything concrete about the questions, she’d felt odd enough about them to return a favor Canfield had done for her long ago.

  He’d received the message while driving to the office to put in a few hours, after which
he would stop by the hospital to check on Phyllis, and the fact that Van Camp was working to create the necessary trail to lay blame on his underling if need be pulled a harsh laugh from his tired body. At least now he knew where his boss stood on the subject of Canfield’s continued employment past December 21. In all likelihood Canfield would turn up dead in some seedy hotel room with a bullet wound to the temple. Even dead, he could still take the lion’s share of the blame for Project: Night House. His only ace in the hole was that Van Camp had to keep him alive for at least another six days. If Canfield was killed prior to the completion of the Shackleton project, Van Camp would find it difficult to attribute that to his former employee.

  He lowered the phone from his ear and, despite the fact that he’d been preparing for this, indeed putting into motion the means by which to circumvent it, it was still difficult news to absorb. So much so that he pulled the car to the side of the road and cut the engine. The resultant quiet that fell over the car’s interior, a state broken only by the sound of tires over asphalt as other cars passed his, acted like a tonic.

  He’d known what the events of recent weeks were building to, yet he’d viewed it almost as a distant thing, something whose eventuality might never materialize. He knew how foolish that sounded as soon as he thought it. The end of this—of the last few years of work—was as physical as the car in which he sat. All he could do now was manipulate what pieces he could to make certain that the man whose ambition this truly was would take the fall before Canfield, and to profit from it as much as he could. If Van Camp died and nothing of Night House was discovered, there were few people better positioned to step into the CEO chair. And if an investigation led back to the company, well, plausible deniability was a much maligned but very real course of action.

  While sitting on the side of the road in his car, he felt a chuckle begin to form as he considered how the job he’d accepted, the one that now marked him for death, was managed with all the niceties such as workload management, flex time, and quality control. It was humorous to him how these things were categorized in the company records. The entire operation was either a gross misrepresentation of the free enterprise ethos or an evolution of a successful business model. Weren’t multinational corporations the countries of the new millennium? He found it comforting, though, that he knew all the budget codes necessary to lay down bread crumbs for investigators.